Abstract » Urbánek
Budapest 2010
Encyclopaedism, Pansophia, and Universal Communication, 1560–1670
Vladimír URBÁNEK
Prophecy and Pansophia between an Upper Hungarian Village and Amsterdam: Networking and Propagation of Mikuláš Drabík
Post-war Comenius studies devoted certain attention to Comenius’s belief in modern prophetic revelations of Christopher Kotter, Christina Poniatowska, and Mikuláš Drabík but they mostly employed a simplified psychological explanation of his fascination with revelations. More recently scholars focused on the use of revelations and prophecies as tools of the political propaganda during and after the Thirty Years War and started to explore the early expressions of Comenius’s millenarianism in the late 1620s in the context of his acquaintance with Kotter and Poniatowska. There is still, however, lack of systematic research on the relationship between Comenius’s later pansophic efforts and his continuing propagation of prophecies, especially those of his former classmate Mikuláš Drabík, in the 1650s and 1660s. This paper has two aims. First, it will map the interplay of Comenius’s pansophic schemes, especially his masterpiece De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica and the Clamores Eliae, and Drabík’s prophecies using both the Latin version of revelations edited by Comenius and Drabík’s own extant autograph which has not been studied yet comprehensively. Secondly, it will show how Drabík, originally a local prophet from a village (small town) of Lednica (Hungarian: Lednic) in Upper Hungary, became, thanks to Comenius’s propagation of his revelations, a well-known and widely discussed figure within the network of Comenius’s correspondents.
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